arXiv:2603.23085cs.AI2026-03中稿 · CVPR被引 4

让医疗视觉语言模型学会主动追问因果,提升诊断可信度。

When Models Learn to Ask Why: Adaptive Causal Reasoning for Trustworthy Medical Vision-Language Models

  • 引入自适应反思机制,自动触发因果分析与验证
  • 在多数据集上实现诊断一致性提升5.4点,幻觉减少超10点
  • 适合关注医疗AI可解释性与临床可靠性的研究者

视觉语言模型(VLMs)通过融合视觉感知与语言推理,实现了可解释的医疗诊断。然而,现有医学链式思维(CoT)模型缺乏显式的因果推理机制,易受虚假相关性干扰,影响临床可靠性。本文指出医学CoT推理的三大挑战:如何自适应触发因果修正、构建高质量因果-伪相关对比样本、保持推理轨迹中的因果一致性。为此,提出MedCausalX端到端框架,显式建模医学VLM中的因果推理链。首先构建CRMed数据集,包含细粒度解剖标注、结构化因果推理链及反事实变体,指导模型学习超越表面相关性的因果关系。基于CRMed,MedCausalX采用两阶段自适应反思架构,配备⟨causal⟩和⟨verify⟩令牌,使模型自主决定何时何地进行因果分析与验证。最后,通过错误归因强化学习优化轨迹级因果修正目标,使模型能区分真实因果依赖与捷径关联。大量实验表明,MedCausalX在多个基准上均优于现有方法,诊断一致性提升+5.4点,幻觉减少超10点,空间定位IoU达最优,树立了因果驱动医学推理新标准。代码与数据集见https://github.com/zhcz328/MedCausalX。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled interpretable medical diagnosis by integrating visual perception with linguistic reasoning. Yet, existing medical chain-of-thought (CoT) models lack explicit mechanisms to represent and enforce causal reasoning, leaving them vulnerable to spurious correlations and limiting their clinical reliability. We pinpoint three core challenges in medical CoT reasoning: how to adaptively trigger causal correction, construct high-quality causal-spurious contrastive samples, and maintain causal consistency across reasoning trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose MedCausalX, an end-to-end framework explicitly models causal reasoning chains in medical VLMs. We first introduce the CRMed dataset providing fine-grained anatomical annotations, structured causal reasoning chains, and counterfactual variants that guide the learning of causal relationships beyond superficial correlations. Building upon CRMed, MedCausalX employs a two-stage adaptive reflection architecture equipped with $\langle$causal$\rangle$ and $\langle$verify$\rangle$ tokens, enabling the model to autonomously determine when and how to perform causal analysis and verification. Finally, a trajectory-level causal correction objective optimized through error-attributed reinforcement learning refines the reasoning chain, allowing the model to distinguish genuine causal dependencies from shortcut associations. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that MedCausalX consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving diagnostic consistency by +5.4 points, reducing hallucination by over 10 points, and attaining top spatial grounding IoU, thereby setting a new standard for causally grounded medical reasoning. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zhcz328/MedCausalX.

医学AI因果推理可解释性视觉语言模型

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